In late 1995 I became a "professional Jewish liberal." After a depressive couple of years in Los Angeles following the death of a partner to AIDS, and then the loss of a job - frustrating as it was, it kept me busy - I was eager to get back into the working world. That summer, a friend in the labor movement mentioned that the Workmen's Circle/Arbeter Ring (WC) had a position open as Southern California Director,and suggested that I apply. With my strong background in history, public relations, more than a smattering of Yiddish, and general progressive politics, I was accepted. I discuss my 15-year WC career elsewhere, but in short time I started producing interesting and attractive programming that helped to recruit more members. I enjoyed good relations both with my local lay board and the national WC organization based in New York City. Long past its heyday, and now a group mostly catering to an older crowd nostalgic for its youthful activism, WC nationally still had a little spunk left in it from its old socialist past.

In the early years of the 21st century, New York's 92nd Street Y Travel Department liaised with various Jewish groups to sponsor travel to Cuba. Americans with a license from the Treasury Department could visit Cuba, variably with greater or looser restrictions. By 2002, well into George W. Bush's presidency, you had to be part of a religious mission of solidarity and spiritual assistance. The organizer of these trips, Batia Plotch, liked to have a staff person from the organization co-lead the trip with her. When she approached WC to form a group, I thought the co-leader opportunity would go to one of our New York staff members, a guy fluent in Spanish who had served in the Peace Corps, but he was not free to go. I expressed interest, and I was okayed. After having tried to get to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade back in the 1970s (and having been refused for being gay), now, 25 years later, I would go under completely different auspices, and all-expenses paid!

I'm not sure where Batia gathered most of the 15 trippers for this May 11-18 excursion,but most were not WC members. I did bring along one WC fellow from L.A., Les Wellins, a former Commie who had sung in Earl Robinson's chorus. He was my roommate. You know how any "in-group" loves to joke around. At our first hotel we had to decide on a combination for the safe in our room. With some skittishness about being in Cuba our first night, I pointed to the ceiling, as if indicating the presence of a bug in our room, and said, "zeks, finef, fir, dray" in Yiddish- six, five, four, three. Without missing a beat, and pointing also to the ceiling, Les responded, "And you know what they're saying to each other? Oy a geshmak! Zeyredn yidish! - Oh, isn't that sweet, they're talking Yiddish!"

Batia asked me to bring some songs we could sing on our bus rides that would reflect the WC character of the trip, so I prepared some song sheets with some Yiddish favorites, and some American labor and folk songs. I included "The Internationale,"as well as "Joe Hill," "Union Maid," "Casey Jones," "The House I Live In," and other standards our choruses sang regularly. Our Cuba group enjoyed that. As anyone will tell you who has visited Cuba, music is everywhere - on every street corner, emanating from every bar or club, and in the concert hall as well. Our group went to a rather decent performance of Madama Butterfly at the Gran Teatro de La Habana, with full orchestra and good, provincial-level singers, and some modest stage sets, that surprised me. In smaller cities in the U.S. one might not have seen a production this competent.

I noticed that the week we were in Cuba would coincide almost exactly with the centennial of Cuban independence. The U.S. granted independence on May 20, 1902, following four years of occupation after the 1898 Cuban-Spanish-AmericanWar. If we weren't there on the 20th itself, we would certainly see all the colorful preparations for it, and perhaps catch some unusual pageants or exhibitions. When we got there and I inquired about May 20th, the Cubans had no interest in that date at all. They considered that "independence" extremely compromised, an independence in name only, as the U.S., under the Platt Amendment, still controlled critical aspects of Cuba's foreign policy and economy.What we did find, however, is that just that week, former President Jimmy Carter made his first trip to Cuba, where he received an enthusiastic welcome with open arms. In the first place, he represented a division in the U.S. ruling class, between those who wanted to continue the repressive, antagonistic policy of strangling Cuba, and others who sought more trade and re-establishment of formal diplomatic relations. At almost every stop, we learned that Carter had been there just that morning, or the day before. At one paladar, a private restaurant, we saw the Carter party's table setting from the night before, soiled plates and napkins just as they had left them. And whenever we got a glimpse of Cuban TV, in bars, hotels,or homes, Carter was the big news item, calling both for more human rights in Cuba, and for a more open U.S. policy. Carter has returned to Cuba since then, tryingto serve as an honest broker for improving relations between our two countries. As everyone knows, Presidents Obama and Raúl Castro changed the rules of the game in December 2014. Whether there ever was a meaningful impact from Carter's visits, I can't say.

Batia had a very well organized itinerary for us. Five nights we stayed at the elegant  Parque Central Hotel in Old Havana, one night in Cienfuegos in the middle of the island, and another night in the historic old colonial-era town of Trinidad. We visited synagogues in Havana, and private homes in the interior of the country where families were trying to keep their Jewish faith alive. We had city tours, visits to artist ateliers, night clubs, concert performances, and spontaneous conversations with anyone we wanted - guides, tour operators, hotel staff, museum personnel, chance encounters. Almost everywhere we went, we noticed billboards featuring pictures of the Cuban Five, the anti-terrorist infiltrators imprisoned in the U.S. in the late Clinton years. The signs read "Volverán!" - They will return! I believed they would one day, once the facts of their case became better known; but privately many Cubans shook their heads in sad disagreement. Our group met with officials at the heavily guarded United States Interests Section,i.e., the Embassy, except that we didn't have formal relations. There we were able to ask questions of our own country's representatives. Chiefly, people wondered, "Gee, if we can have diplomatic exchanges, trade, international cooperation and investmentin Vietnam, China, and Saudi Arabia, can't we just put the whole Cold War thing behind us and make peace with the Cubans?"

Our national WC publication The Call carried a short piece on our Cuba trip, with a photo I took in the Sephardic synagogue in Havana. On my return to L.A., I also wrote it up for the July issue of our local newsletter, the Arbeter Briv. First, I need to explain about a very famous Yiddish song made popular by the actress Molly Picon in a film by the same name, Yidl mitn fidl, or The Little Jewish Kid with the Fiddle. My article featured two photos side by side, of Castro and of myself, and we titled it "Fidel mitn Yidl."

With Soviet support gone, Cuba has been thrust back on its own resources for survival. It has compromised its socialism to some extent by welcoming joint capital ventures with investors from other countries,so that now, once again, tourism is the country's largest industry.In fact, the U.S. dollar is the standard unit of currency. Hotels and resorts are being built with Spanish, Mexican, Dutch and other capital.An important packager of tropical Cuban fruit juices is Israeli, despite the fact that Israel and Cuba do not currently enjoy diplomatic relations.... The embargo also gives the Cuban government some moral prestige: Misplaced social priorities and poor economic policies can be explained away with reference to the crippling embargo, even though Cuba does active trade with just about every other nation in the world.The Cubans, having left managerial authority for so long in Soviet hands, have yet to master the skills, necessary in any system, to run an economy. Cuba's healthcare and educational systems are among the best in the world, yet too many people are still crushingly poor. Begging in the streets is a common sight.

Tourism created in Cuba a wider disparity of income than the country had known in its palmier egalitarian days: A hotel porter or a taxi driver in Havana, or at one of the many new beach resorts, could make more money in an hour, in U.S. dollars, than a teacher or manual worker, or even a doctor, in a month. We heard, and we observed as well, that hotels catering to international tourists hired "whiter" Cubans for these lucrative jobs. No doubt, such income filtered its way out to immediate families, and perhaps beyond that, but of such imbalances social injustice could grow. I noted, on our five-hour bus rides across the countryside, that vast acreage looked fallow, not dedicated to crops or grazing. When I asked our guides why this was so, when such a high percentage of Cuba's food, including the dietary staples of rice and beans, is imported, they nodded their heads but could provide no answer. Perhaps they were thinking, "This is the result of a tightly managed command economy," but felt unable to express it out loud. A decade or so later, Cuba did in fact institute some radical reforms, introducing more profit incentive into their system. Granting farmers usufruct of the land for private development is part of the new arrangement. More crops are raised, and of course, a tax comes back to the government.

My enthusiasm for Cuba heightened after the trip, and in anticipation of another trip in August that Batia asked me to lead. I attended a backyard barbecue in the Los Angeles environs on June 30th, where Lourdes Bassué, cultural attaché of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C., would speak. This was my first introduction to the L.A. Coalition in Solidarity with Cuba. Ms. Bassué represented her country extremely well, full of sage reflection and open to a wide-ranging discussion about ways to overcome anti-Cuban opinion in the U.S. I might add that she was of Afro-Cuban background, and I was thrilled that the Revolution had given her this kind of opportunity in life!

I led the August trip, with a dozen participants, by myself. One particularly entertaining and insightful couple on the trip were Lucy and Lori Rozencwaig, both of them Cuban natives, now, in 2002, making their first return visit. They came extremely nervous about being detained or questioned, but those fears quickly dissipated and they had a wonderful time. Lori had been a student revolutionary and had initially supported the Revolution. He had studied accounting, and worked, if memory serves, at the Capri Hotel. After the American and Cuban owners left, Che Guevara personally put Lori in charge of the Capri. But most of their Jewish families and friends had left by 1961 or so. They were not personally so unhappy in Cuba, but figured it was time for them to pack up, too.I gained new insight into the departure of so many (90%) of the Cuban Jews, leavingonly about 1500 behind. When Cuba declared itself socialist, and allied with the Soviet Bloc, many Cuban Jews were professionals or small businessmen and no doubt feared nationalization and loss of their accustomed livelihood. But beyondthat, they knew very well that less than a decade before, in the USSR, Poland,Czechoslovakia, Hungary and elsewhere, Jews had been subjected to show trials for supposed crimes of Zionism or disloyalty to the state, and either liquidated or sentenced to long prison terms. It is reasonable to suppose that the Cubans feared that kind of outcome from socialism, even though Cuba had never experienced virulent anti-Semitism in any form.

On this trip we attended services at the Patronato, the principal synagogue of Havana, affiliated with the Conservative movement, where Dr. José Miller, president of the congregation, gave the sermon. He went on at length, in an impassioned voice, about the right of Israel to defend itself against attacks, the Cuban Jews' embraceof Zionism, and so forth - little different from what we might have heard in a Jewish congregation almost anywhere in the world. I was bowled over by the fact that he apparently felt perfectly comfortable airing such views in public without fear of censorship, for he definitely did not reflect official Cuban policy. Clearly this freedom was part of the "deal" the remaining Jewish community had made with the government.

It struck me as so funny that never having been to Cuba before, I had now gone there twice in the space of four months! The tips I received for my efforts enabled me to purchase a couple of Cuban art works for my home. Batia was doing a steady business with her Jewish tours to Cuba, and that December,still in 2002, I went again, this time with a large group of 35 travelers, who would celebrate Chanukah (and Christmas) in Cuba. I brought a little menorah along with me, and a box of candles, and each night at dinner we lit them to underscore the Jewish character of our trip. As always, we met with the leadership of the Patronato synagogue. Years later, after the arrest and imprisonment in Cuba of USAID subcontractor Alan Gross, who visited Cuba repeatedly to distribute contraband electronic equipment meant to destabilize the government, I heard his oft-repeated claim - endlessly parroted by the U.S. government and the uncritical media - that he was merely trying to help the Jewish community there stay connected to their coreligionists around the globe with some disbelief. I did not believe the people I met in Havana would have any dalliance with an illicit character like this, and endanger their very precious welfare as Jews living in Cuba. As it turns out, the very same community leaders I had met trip after trip were quoted as saying they had never heard of Gross, never met him, and certainly never had any dealings with him. Which did nothing, of course, to stop the repetition of his claims.

This time I managed to meet up with some young gay folks, and hung out with them in my spare time. I attended Christmas Eve services at the packed HavanaCathedral, presided over by Cardinal Jaime Ortega, with my new gay friends. This time, no one tipped me on our last day together, and I admit feeling hurt and unappreciated for my efforts. The right chemistry never developed with so many people to herd on and off the bus, in and out of hotels and museums. My third trip in eightmonths!

May of 2003, my fourth trip to Cuba in just a year's time, with a modest group of adozen or so, turned out to be my most difficult. One small but unique tourist site in Havana, of more than passing Jewish interest, is the only monument in the world that I know of memorializing Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Batia did not include it on her itinerary, but since we were going to pass right by it, I asked our driver topull over so we could see it and take some photos. We were in fact shortly coming up on the 50th anniversary of the executions. But we had one quite reactionary man with us who had real anger-management issues. I had to wonder why he even chose to come to Cuba - what was he expecting? He and his wife chose to return to our hotel that day rather than accompany us on our afternoon tour and a quick photo stop at the memorial. A couple of days later, per usual, I brought out my WC songbook for the long bus ride back from Trinidad: At one point this man got up out of his seat, yanked the mike out of my hands in the middle of a song, and actually broke it. If anything, his aggressive behavior bonded me more closely with the others, but it unsettled us for the rest of our time together.

I believe it was on this trip, one year after my first introduction to Cuba, that we once again attended the opera. It was Madama Butterfly again, but now only with piano accompaniment, no orchestra. I wondered if the choice of this opera had anything to do with its theme: American naval officer seduces his little Japanese childbride in a sham marriage, knocks her up, and abandons her. Typical imperialist behavior! Again we visited the U.S. Interests Section, and this time I had to use the rest room, down a hallway, around a corner, and into the men's. Along that hallway were dozens of framed anti-Castro, anti-socialist cartoons by a Cuban artist, commissioned no doubt by the Interests Section. I wondered to myself, Hmmm, is this normal? A diplomatic office flagrantly promoting regime change in its host country? The People's Weekly World published a letter of mine on September 6, 2003. "Why omit Cuba?" I asked: "Almost every week you have an item on Cuba, sometimes a fairly big story. But week after week you print a map of the world as the logo for your International Notes, and where's Cuba? It's larger than Iceland or Ireland, but you show them and almost never run a story on those countries. How 'bout some cartographical solidarity?"This letter I signed Art Gordon, from L.A. (Arthur being my middle name). Anyone who knew me, and was reading the PWW, could identify me easily, but I did not feel ready to blast my full name out in a Communist newspaper.

My December trip to Cuba, pilgrimage #5 and, as it turned out, my last, flummoxed me somewhat. Again, no one tipped me (I got my trip for free but no pay, so tips represented the only actual income I received for the week). I felt like a waiter getting stiffed by a party of eleven. But in this case, I could understand why. A family of five came along - the wife a WC member in New York who sang with our chorus there, and the husband, an extremely wealthy investor-builder of Iranian Jewish background who, it turns out, was my Yale '66 classmate! The feeling developed on the trip that I was an equal on everyone else's level, not some poor, needy shlump with his hand out.

A funny thing happened in the town of Trinidad, where a couple of us took a taxi from the resort five miles out of town on the beach, into the city for midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Just a few days before leaving L.A., I had attended a bat mitzvah, where the rabbi, the girl's teacher, talked about the Torah passage of the week, saying how on those long, dark nights of the soul, when we cannot sleep and are tortured by doubt and uncertainty, the light breaks forth and we know we can ask God and count on Him to sustain us. The bishop in Trinidad who gave the Christmas sermon (in Spanish, naturally) talked about how hard life is sometimes - our work situation, trying to make ends meet, our loneliness, maybe a son in prison, or children who have left Cuba to seek a better life - and "on those long, dark nights of the soul...," he started, and practically recited the rabbi's speech from memory! It was all I could do to stop myself from breaking out laughing in the middle of that solemn moment.

My trippers seemed to like their family time together, so in Cienfuegos, while they lounged around the hotel pool, I went out strolling. I passed by the local office of the Cuban CP, and stopped in to say hello. They gave me a poster showing the revolutionary sites around the city. I also visited the office of the local Comité de Amistad con los Pueblos. I imagine they didn't get too many Americans sitting down for a chat, so they welcomed me sincerely, and we discussed the Cuban Fiveand other themes. Back in Havana, I hung out in front of the Yara Theatre, where the gay boys gather,and quickly found myself swept up in a shared car and deposited on an empty construction lot fairly distant from town, where a sound system had been set up for an informal dance with about 150 people in the chilly December night air. This was the single largest expression of gay culture I ever saw in Cuba. (There are many more now.) I'm glad to have witnessed it, and applauded their yearning for some kind of collective autonomy, but I could only compare it to the very early years of LGBT liberation in America, maybe in some smaller city in the Midwest or the South, at a time of first, tentative exploration of what it meant to seek out and to form a community.

Starting in 2004, WC committed to hosting a monthly Cuban film series in league with the L.A. Coalition in Solidarity with Cuba. Some were U.S. or international films, but most of them Cuban, opening a rare window into the culture of a place few Americans really knew much about. Often we'd have a short political update or postcard campaign to promote. We rarely had a big attendance, but I got to know all the local pro-Cuba activists well, and they appreciated our hospitality. It turned out that being a "left-wing" WC redoubt gave us a certain cachet in L.A., in the Jewish and the general progressive communities, and within the global WC as well. And it wasn't geferlakh, as we say in Yiddish, it didn't put us in danger.

I had a remarkable run of five trips to Cuba over the span of a year and a half or so,but I have not returned since. Occasionally the idea of another trip has stirred me, but I felt ambiguous about basically repeating the same  itinerary for a sixth time and never getting to see the western end of Cuba, Pinar del Río, nor the eastern end, Santiago. Next time I go, it'll more likely be on my own. The travel ban will have relaxed completely and I can take the time to go exploring at a leisurely pace, stay in more modest private homes, and maybe do some reporting about all the changes that have happened. In the meantime, I played the role I could when I had the opportunity, to break down some barriers and bring our two peoples a little bit closer together!

Image: Pen portrait of the author by Cuban street artist Jose.